windows 10 sucks, so bad. I have a "high end" laptop with that piece of shit operating system. It's been on a full reset for three hours. I need it for travel, but may give up and go with ipad and phone.

:-/

Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

A month on the road and when I get back my windows 7 pc will probably be clustered up too from lack of use, but at least it's lan connected and protected. Staring at the spinning wheel gets sooo fucking old.

Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.

SSD's are just amazing. My middle of the road Windows laptop boots in about 15 seconds with the SSD, vs. minutes before. After 6+ months of normal consumer use, many hours a day, the 1 TB drive says it's got 100% of life left. (Sandisk Ultra II, 1 TB). $250ish when I bought it - half that now on Amazon.

Windows 7 likes it just fine. Not getting off that until I have to a year from now, when it goes out of extended service.

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

Look, I'm sure many of you know this already. The peak of Windows functionality was probably the Windows NT to Windows XP era. Most "advances" since then, merely allow more of your habits to be digitized and monitored. I don't know about the rest of you, but within minutes of doing a Google search or an Amazon product search, I am experiencing targeted advertizing here on Peak Oil and other sites, that reflect the very item I was just searching.

You really do have a "permanent record", and it includes records of everything you ever bought online, everything you ever searched online, everything you read online, everything you ever posted online, and every picture and piece of porn ever downloaded/played.

They have always watched you, and always will. If your hardware impedes their efforts, they will convince you to upgrade it. Modern mobile devices have a design life of two years.

having gone through the blue screen PC nonsense many years ago all too often I decided to change the whole household out to apple products. Imac, Mac laptop, ipads and iphones. Have occasionally over the years substituted an android phone for the iphone but in general, I end up going back to iphone. NOt that I think the OS is that much better or the interface, I just got tired of all the virus BS and update nonsense. Haven't regretted it. In fact the only problems over the years I had after changing were to do with office laptops which were PC Windows contraptions. I suspect Linux is a better solution but I'm just not a computer guru to that extent, in fact the last program I ever wrote was probably in Pascal ( a language some here probably never heard of)...I still remember walking a huge box of computer punch cards over to load into a mainframe in order to run a simple factor analysis program that I can now do on my phone!

Any thoughts on what to go OS-wise for internet access, normal browsing and video, online banking, etc. once Windows 7 goes out of service a year from today (by coincidence)?

....

I'm leaning toward just running the software I'm used to on my Win 7 laptop OFF the network, never connecting to the network, using a flash drive to move anything I need to it manually. And then having a separate online machine, so I don't have to worry about upgrades, backward compatibility, mixed OS/etc. issues, and do future apps and any network related stuff on the new machine. That lets the new internet PC choice be unconstrained vs. the old PC choice.

The main problem there is so many apps are becoming online content only (I've avoided them so far, but how long can that be viable?

...

Windows 10 sucks, as has been pointed out. Could use it in a pinch, but I hate the spyware, the hassling if you turn it off, and unlike Win 7 which as been rock solid, 10 has locked up completely on me. Extended support doesn't end until 10/2025, and obviously lots of PC's are available with it. It's an option, but I'd as soon bash my hand with a hammer at this point, unless I end up feeling there's no other realistic choice. ***

Windows 8.1 might be OK, but it goes out of extended service in Jan 2023, AND is getting hard to find on PC's. I hate to keep having to switch this stuff more often than required. At least with Windows, I don't have to worry about banks supporting it, etc.

The other (reasonable) possibility I see would be a Chrome OS laptop. That seems to have security against viruses, etc. going for it. Main thing I ***HATE*** is them wanting to store everything in the cloud, supposedly well encrypted, but I just don't trust that given corporate behavior and hacking -- not anymore.

(No UNIX variants, IMO). In my experience, virtually NO ONE who isn't proficient in the given Unix variant can get the damn thing to work properly. And can't get the fixes that supposedly resolve it to install. I DON'T want to learn to be a UNIX system programmer, and not get paid!)

...

Thoughts, experiences? 2020 and 2023 are coming, and this issue could hit various users, and make them crabby (especially us older farts), so sharing on this might make sense.

Thanks in advance for constructive input.

If I should put this somewhere else, let me know -- I just thought starting under OS's looked good when this caught my eye.

...

*** By realistic, if I have to spend tons of time learning all kinds of things and doing lots of maintenance to even USE the damn thing, and not get paid, this old man doesn't says it doesn't make the cut. Call me crabby or a wimp. That's OK. At least I'm honest. What was fun 30 years ago then PC's and I were young no longer is. And I don't want to have to pay someone to maintain my PC. I just want to USE the damn thing, back up my user data and HDD etc. like I can with WIN 7 and Partition Wizard.

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

As of now I am planning on staying on windows 7 for my main PC. The wife talked me into installing windows 10 on our media system and I hate it. It's always downloading updates when I'm trying to watch something and bogging down the harddrive & cpu causing the video/audio to go out of sync. And good luck trying to turn off this 'feature'. Microsoft treats the user like a virus and thinks it knows what's best for you.

If I reinstall the OS again on either of my PCs it will probably be Windows 7.

ralfy wrote:The problem with older versions is that they will stop receiving updates soon.

Right, Ralfy. SORRY I didn't make that clear.

The problem when a Windows OS goes out of extended service is that (unless something changes), Microsoft stops providing fixes for it, including critical security flaws, which come up over time.

So the longer you're out of extended service, the bigger your risk. At some point, trying to do online banking, etc. might be very dangerous. I'm not sure what might happen if you bank on a PC with a very old out of maint. O/S, and something bad happens re security problems -- whether the bank would pay you back if your account is hacked.

This is why I ONLY use XP on an old machine where I ***NEVER*** connect to the internet. Any data moved to or from my XP machine, where I run old 16 bit games, is moved directly with flash drives. As I understand it, there are some places (like Norton, last time I checked) still supporting antivirus packages for XP, but some of the security issues would need OS changes to fix. (I'm not an expert -- this is just what I read / have been led to understand).

So, again:

Windows 7 goes out of extended support 1/14/2020Windows 8 (and 8.1) goes out of extended support in Jan. 2023Windows 10 goes out of extended support in Oct. 2025

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

Newfie wrote:Hopefully we will eventually get a Uinex version that allows us to do these things. I have an old machine I can dual boot.

But these days I do the most stuff on my iPad. I do use my laptop for the odd CAD drawing.

Yeah, I realized later I left out Apple. I see that, for example, a full version of Acrobat exists for Apple MacOS. So that might be another option. Expensive for the hardware and software, but at least supported, and one doesn't have to expose their documents to the cloud.

Even if it's easy to find a short term solution for browsing, email, etc., long term PRIVATE copying, storage, publishing (encrypted, via email or the like) of documents is critical to me, and for consistency and it working and anyone being able to read it, PDF seems like the way to go.

The idea was computing was supposed to get easier and users could just click on icons and get things done. Well, that's nice in the short term, but as hardware and software goes obsolete, transition can be so horrific (expensive, time consuming, etc), that I find that idea to be a myth for people who need backward compatibility, security, support, etc.

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

Well, it looks (from a high level poking around the internet) like Chromebook / Chrome OS should in theory be a good solution for most people if (and it's a huge if):

1). You trust the Google cloud to be truly safe for your data. 2). You trust that Google stores the data in the cloud well encrypted as advertised AND that they have no back door to freely look at your data (and profit hugely from access to all its users data, over time. Because, of course, no company would be incented to to that.) 3). You are willing to completely live within the ecosphere Google provides with you in the Chrome OS for docs, mail, etc., since it basically won't let you install anything outside that for the Chrome OS environment -- which wants to work in a clean sandbox each boot up, for security.

If you're willing to put up with all of that, then apparently you can copy small amounts of data manually to hard drives or flash drives connected to a Chromebook via USB. So you could then process such data in other PC environments like Windows, since Chrome supposedly can format the output drives in formats that Windows understands.

....

I think I'm going to get a book, a cheap Chromebook, and do some poking around.

All solutions look tainted to me, but at least my old brain can seem to grasp the Chrome environment, and not needing to constantly fight the security battle sounds refreshing after Windows on the internet.

In a couple/few weeks, I'll plan to report back here with a summary of what I think. My data is important to me, so others may as well benefit from what I learn. (And as a side benefit, if I can never have to fool with Windows 10 again, well wouldn't THAT be peachy!)

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

The reason I am sticking with windows is I need it to run all of the games I have. So if you are just browsing the web, Apple/Linux/ChromeOS might be a good solution for you but unfortunately it won't meet my needs.

Microsoft is said to be working on a lighter version of windows. At first this sounded great to me as I was hoping to just wait until this OS is released and skip windows 10 altogether. But then I heard this OS version is stripping out many legacy features and might not even support win32 apps at all. So then we are back to not meeting my needs. Maybe I'll just use my outdated windows 7 for most of my stuff and use one of my windows 10 machines for sensitive things like banking.

Anyway, you might want to at least look at Windows Lite to see if it meets your needs Outcast_Searcher. Although it is not ready yet so it's mostly rumors at this point.

Microsoft has been toying around with the idea of making Windows a lighter operating system for a while, and there have been a couple of attempts at doing so. After Windows RT and Windows 10 S, the company is reportedly working on "Windows Lite", but there's a catch - it may not even be called Windows.

The name "Lite" was first spotted in the code of build 18282, but Brad Sams of Petri has discovered a few more tidbits of the purported operating system. According to Sams' report, the new version will be based on the rumored Windows Core OS, and try to take on Google's Chrome OS

Lite is said to only run UWP apps and PWAs from the Store, and it will strip even more legacy components from the OS. This is so that the software becomes lighter and faster, while also enabling instant-on and always-connected capabilities, as well as making the OS more suitable to run on different chipset architectures such as ARM. It remains unclear, however, if this means Win32 apps from the Store won't be supported, since they are still supported in Windows 10 in S Mode. One thing to note is that this version will apparently not be aimed at business environments, and you may not even be able to buy it directly yourself. It seems like Windows Lite will only be available for OEMs to include in their machines.

I might give up computing all together. Might seem like a small step to some, but I was a heathkit junkie that hand assembled an 8-bit processor in 1980 or so with 16kb of volatile ram programmed in BASIC. Slowly but surely, over time, the power available to end users has been stripped away, and we are "pulled" along into endless updates driven by greedy OS giants and criminals.

I give up! I'm too old for this shit!

Stop filling dumpsters, as much as you possibly can, and everything will get better.